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Wednesday, June 25, 2014

27) Strawberry Yogurt Popsicles

There are a few things we do every summer without fail, swimming, trip to the beach, visiting our favorite gardens and maybe most importantly berry picking. We usually make several picking trips a year with either cousins or friends but my most favorite is picking strawberries. Mostly because it seems like summer doesn't really start till we do. This year was the little brothers first trip. He happily sat in the field desperately trying to reach the ripe red strawberries just out of his reach. Finally just before we left he got one, stuck it right in his mouth and gave me the most satisfied look as red juice streamed down his chin. Success. Needless to say his sisters ate more then their fair share as well. Despite the pick one, eat one technique that generally seems to be implemented by all kids picking berries we still managed to pick 8lbs of strawberries!

We brought the strawberries home, filled our kitchen sink with warmish water and a splash of vinegar and let the strawberries soak in the bath. The strawberry bath was something I learned at a Mesh Baltimore class I took last year and the girls thought bathing strawberries was both silly and awesome. After the bath we divided up the strawberries. A bulk of them were cut and frozen for smoothies and other things throughout the year. Eating fresh June strawberries in February is one of those things that I love on a day when I feel like I just can't take winter anymore. We put a small bowl of strawberries in the fridge to be eaten right away and set aside an additional pint to make Strawberry Yogurt Popsicles. Every year we try out some fun strawberry recipe. We have made ice cream, jam, and even soap. So a few days before our picking, when I saw a recipe for the Strawberry Yogurt Pops on the Kitchn's instagram I knew it was a recipe we would most definitely need to try out.

The recipe only calls for a few ingredients:

1 pint of strawberries

1/3 cup of sugar (you could probably do honey if you didn't want to do sugar)

lemon juice

1 cup of yogurt (we used vanilla Greek yogurt)

The Popsicles were very quick and easy to make. Honestly the girls did a lot of it. We started by cleaning and slicing a pint of strawberries. We then added 1/3 cup of sugar to the strawberries and a little lemon juice and let them sit in a bowl for 20 minutes to macerate. After 20 minutes we took the strawberry mix and poured it into the blender and blended it up just to break the strawberries down a bit. If your strawberries were ripe enough you might be able to just smash them with a fork a bit and have slightly chunkier fruit pieces. We then poured the blended fruit back into the bowl, stirred in the yogurt and poured the mix into our Popsicle molds. A few hours in the freezer and they were ready to sample.

If you read the list of ingredients above you already know these were delicious. There was really no way to go wrong here and the girls have been eating these almost every night. I am hoping to pick some blueberries in the next few weeks. I see blueberry yogurt pops in our future.